My creativity advent calendar 2024: Day 10.
“I’m not creative”
I’m one of those annoying people who is quite good at a lot of things but not very good at any of them — probably because I never felt interested enough to practice. I’m impatient and get bored easily.
I used to say I wasn’t creative because I never felt the urge to create anything in particular in the way I’ve heard other people talk about their talents and passions so it’s been interesting reading Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” where he starts by saying that everyone is a creator and that we all engage in being creative on a daily basis: “To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before, a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, finding a new way home to avoid a traffic jam.”
So I’ve revised my opinion of myself. Every day I create delicious meals (I’m a pretty good cook), I put clothes together in a combination of colour and style that pleases me and I’m good at making clothes and soft furnishings too. I solve problems (that’s also my business so I’d better be good at that), I grow things — although I think that’s more down to nature than me, and I’m really good at communicating: listening, talking and writing to express ideas.
And I read. I’m intensely curious and I’m always creating interpretations and making links and forming new ideas from the things I read.
So I am creative. I bring things into being that weren’t there before and they are unique to me. But despite Ursula Le Guinn’s assertion that reading is art, I don’t think of myself as an artist.
How about you? How do you describe yourself?
